Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

I used to hear that the collective nouns applied to animals—a murder of crows, a crash of rhinocerota, an exultation of larks—were official but forgotten, that "a herd of whales" or "a flock of minnows" is simply wrong. But conversations like this strengthen my suspicion that back when they coined "a shrewdness of apes" they were just having fun, as we are now.